Things That Don’t Look Like Anything

When I talk about things like molecules, atoms and particles with nonscientists, a question I am often asked is what these things look like. And they never seem satisfied with my response: that, really, they don’t look like anything at all. It’s not that they’re invisible as such; it’s just that sentences involving what they look like don’t make any sense. You can’t describe their appearance because they don’t have an appearance to describe.

The thought makes people uncomfortable.

The idea of something not looking like anything is not a new one. Sounds do not look like anything. We know that sounds exist, but that physical appearance is not something we can ascribe to them. When we talk about sounds, we describe them in nonvisual terms.

Sounds, or ideas or desires or smells, have a certain abstract quality that seems to excuse this. But particles are stuff. They are physical objects whose masses are known to remarkable degrees of accuracy, and since everything we can see is made up of aggregates of them, it seems impossible that they cannot be described visually.

Let’s consider what happens when you see something, step by step.

An object is illuminated by a bombardment of photons. These photons interact with the surface of the object. Some are absorbed by the object – it is this absorption that gives the object its colour. The photons that are not absorbed are scattered around in all directions, and many of them enter through the pupil of your eye. These photons reach the retina, where they cause chemical changes in molecules like 11-cis-retinal; electrical reports of these changes are transmitted to the brain, where they are interpreted as ‘seeing’ those photons.

So to ‘see’ something means that photons bouncing off the thing cause chemical changes in your eye. This is fine for large objects like apples and oranges, but what if the object is smaller? Most people can’t see objects smaller than 0.1 mm, because there aren’t enough photons reflecting off them to react with our eyes. We get around this problem by using stronger illumination and magnifying lenses, allowing us to see things like blood cells.

But what about objects that are even smaller?

Well, here we start to have a problem. For objects smaller than 0.002 mm, photons of visible light start to be too big to see things clearly. In order to resolve details at this size level, smaller, higher-energy particles than photons need to be used. This is how electron microscopy works: instead of using reflected photons, you use reflected electrons, which are much smaller and better able to probe the surface of what you’re examining.

Is this really ‘seeing’ the object? The microscopic object under examination is not being studied with light, remember. This is why electron microscope images are monochrome. Light isn’t involved in the process at any point until a computer screen shows you, with light, the pattern of reflected electrons. Still, we are presented with pictures of the object’s surface, so it’s certainly like seeing, and the object certainly has an appearance that can be discovered, even if only indirectly.

What if the object is smaller?

Eventually an object can be so small that not even electrons can give you good enough resolution, and even more indirect means of gathering information must be used. One of them, atomic force microscopy, is more analogous to touch than sight: it drags a tiny needle across a surface to register bumps in the surface where the individual atoms are. But apart from the atoms’ location in space, there’s no information here about their appearance. Atoms do not interact with light in a way that gives meaning to the word ‘looks like’. They do absorb light and so might be said to have colour in a technical sense, but no picture of an atom could ever be drawn based on their interaction with light. And smaller particles than atoms don’t interact with light at all. You can’t see them, ever, because there is nothing there to see.

But still, some picture of a very tiny object might be drawn. Questions about its shape, for example, are not meaningless – but on a small enough scale, questions of shape become questions about properties rather than appearance. The question ‘is x round?’ becomes ‘are all the points on x’s surface the same distance from one central point?’. This is a question that can be answered, but only because it is a mathematical question about the properties of a certain type of object. And it turns out that the equations describing these objects reveal the them to be strange and wonderful things – things that behave in ways that make absolutely no sense to people used to objects the size of apples and oranges. They cannot be seen, but they can be described, and this description is better than seeing them. A mathematical description of a particle is more precise and less fallible than the clumsy tool of vision that evolution gave us to survive in a world full of large-scale objects. And we can reach this level of acquaintance with these particles that no one has ever seen because even though we can’t see them, we can imagine them.

A very true point, and a very important one. Actually, one thing I might write about later (when I’ve thought about it a bit more!) is the limitation of our imagination. After all, imagination, like vision, is a tool for surviving in a world with certain properties. There are some things it has evolved to cope with easily, and some things it struggles with. But over the centuries, just as microscopes and telescopes have let us amplify our limited vision, mathematics and logic have helped us amplify our limited imagination. More on that in a later post, probably, but the final chapter of Dawkins’s “The God Delusion” talks a lot about this idea.